Living and working in the United States over the last few years has not been easy. I say that not as a partisan, but as a Canadian historian of American populism who now teaches and works in the U.S. — in solidly Republican Nebraska, no less. From north of the border, America can look like a country that has lost its mind, consumed by grievance, authoritarian impulses, and culture war. That picture isn’t entirely wrong. But it is incomplete in ways that matter deeply for Canada’s own democratic future.
The first misunderstanding Canadians need to let go of is the idea that Americans, broadly speaking, care much about Canada at all. They simply do not. Most Americans barely think about Canada. Even amid the rhetorical noise coming from President Donald Trump and his allies, Canada does not loom large in the American political imagination. Those who have visited talk about its beauty, and not much else. When Trump attacks Canada — our economy, our sovereignty, our legitimacy — it plays far louder in Ottawa and Toronto than it does in Omaha or Minneapolis.
That does not mean Trump’s threats are unserious. They are extremely serious. Trump is an authoritarian in both impulse and practice, and his recent decision to repost a racist image depicting former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes is a reminder of just how openly he now operates. His politics are rooted in a crude, backward-looking understanding of political economy more suited to the 1970s than to the twenty-first century. Canada has become a convenient target for his desire to dominate, intimidate, and win at all costs. His fixation on tariffs, borders, and economic punishment is less about policy coherence than about spectacle and power.
Canadians make a mistake when they assume Trump’s electoral victories represent a mass embrace of his worldview. Many Americans — including those who voted for him — did so out of deep dissatisfaction with a broken political system, not enthusiasm for authoritarian governance or radical nationalism. In 2024, just as in 2016, the Democratic nominees and their teams lost winnable elections through lack of imagination, poor communication, and an inexplicable unwillingness to speak directly to swing voters’ concerns.
On the ground in Nebraska, even among conservative and religious Americans, I regularly encounter shock and unease about recent ICE actions like those in Minneapolis, and quiet disbelief at the economic self-harm caused by tariffs. At a recent trip to the tire shop, the store’s owner — a woman in her late forties wearing a prominent crucifix — volunteered her opinion on “the crazy man who’s attacking everybody.” She did not strike me as a progressive activist. Trump’s aggressiveness has alienated many such voters, something reflected in recent polling but even more clearly in everyday conversation.
This matters because Canada’s reaction has increasingly been driven by fearful, reactive posturing rather than sober democratic self-interest. Canada should not calibrate its politics around Trump’s moods or threats. We need a firm, deliberate strategy for domestic growth, built on the assumption that Americans are no longer reliable partners and that their domestic public has little investment in how we feel about any of it. And we need to harden our own institutions against the kind of pseudo-populism Trump has normalized elsewhere.
On the economic side, that means being pragmatic about energy development, as the current Liberal government is attempting. This may require setting aside some environmental commitments in the short term — an uncomfortable position, but a necessary one given our circumstances. It also means resolving the long-standing dysfunction of interprovincial trade. Canada loses billions in economic opportunity because provinces cannot trade freely with one another, an absurdity that has rightly attracted attention recently and ought to be the easiest problem on the list to fix.
On the institutional side, the more difficult and more important work involves confronting provincial overreach. For too long, Canada has allowed individual provinces — Alberta and Quebec most visibly — to undermine the constitutional order through the repeated use of the Notwithstanding Clause. Empowering the Supreme Court through additional legislation to address provincial encroachment on federal authority, without waiting for Parliament to initiate each case, would be a meaningful structural reform.
Alberta is the most urgent case. Premier Danielle Smith’s recent attacks on the Canada Health Act are not a legitimate expression of provincial rights; they are an assault on the federal framework that holds the country together, and they deserve a response in both Parliament and the courts. Smith is not Trump — she has a discernible ideological centre and does not govern purely through spectacle — but she shares his willingness to lie and to manipulate institutions for political advantage, and that tendency needs to be checked before it compounds.
Canada needs to be stronger economically to face Trump in the near term. But the longer task is reforming our institutions to ensure that no Canadian version of what we are watching in the United States can take root here. Those two goals are not in tension — they are the same project.
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